Proposal calls for 30 power-producing wind turbines in W. Maine

A western Maine wind-power proposal that's been a decade in the works has been filed with state land use regulators.

The joint venture of Endless Energy Corp. of Yarmouth and California-based Edison Mission Group calls for 30 wind turbines just west of Sugarloaf Mountain. The Land Use Regulation Commission is reviewing Maine Mountain Power LLC's 1,600-page proposal.

Endless Energy owner Harley Lee says the 90-megawatt plan has been in the works for more than a decade and could be built in as little as one construction season. If it goes through, its wind turbines would be sufficient to power 44,000 homes a year.

Lee said he hopes recent volatility in the energy market will sway some wind-power critics to his side. Just last week, managers of the region's power grid said Maine electric consumers may be asked during the cold months ahead to take steps to conserve power in order to avoid the prospect of rolling blackouts.

The $130 million project is expected to face opposition. A group called Friends of the Western Mountains has collected signatures from about 2,000 people who are concerned about the project's impact.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ME_WIND_TURBINES_MEOL-?SITE=VARIT&SECTION=US&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2005-12-19-09-33-53

which is surprising.
http://www.appalachiantrail.org/site/c.jkLXJ8MQKtH/b.839393/k.8DFF/Maine_Wind_Farm.htm

but 44,000 is slightly less that the population of our biggest "city", and 44,000 is bigger than any other community, other than portland, in the state! For us, thats a lot of power!

While the nay-sayers say it will irredeemably ruin a special and beautiful place, I say hogwash. The sugarloaf region is so under-populated, and the population in that part of the state is not growing. You can't throw a rock more than 10 feet without seeing some gloriously stunning mountains or forest or lake or marsh or whatever out there. It would be one thing if they wanted to put these things on top of Katahdin or on Cadillac Mt. Anyways, windmills themselves are beautiful, especially when they are all aligned just so.

Maine is well on its way to being a truly special state, an ecologically minded state both in day to day life and in business. Let's take the next step, shall we?

I very much doubt that these windmills will produce power for 44,000 people all the time, but only when the wind is blowing.

That said, I have never met a wind power program that I didn't like. To the extent that wind can replace natural gas power, it is a good thing. Every wind power proposal these days that is proposed should be built. The slim chance that humanity faces because of global climate change can only be enlarged to the extent that we support non greenhouse gas technologies like wind power.

Wind cannot, unfortunately, replace coal, which is base loaded power. Only nuclear energy can replace coal.

Wind power is nice and it is much more efficent then solar power but let's look at the total amount of land those turbines take up, the energy used to build them, and the birds which be killed by their spinning blades. 90 megawatts of peak power is nice but tiny. One nuclear power plant can make 1,000mw of net output in a fraction of the total area. That's a huge amount of power and it likely costs less on a per megawatt basis too.

Our choice boils down to a lot of coal & oil powered plants with a tiny fraction of wind and solar output or a lot of nuclear plants with the same tiny fraction of wind and solar output. I think we all know which option is better for our environment.

...in media articles. When they give the capacity of the plant (MW), it's almost always peak (and hence approx 3 times the average sustained power.) However, when they rate it in "number of homes powered" half of the time the beat reporter gives out misleading back-of-the-envelope calculations based on peak power, and half of the time they are using the project's estimated annual kwh numbers.

Oh, the bird canard is history BTW. Greenies complained, wind power producers listened, and problem is solved in new installs -- bird kill went way down once they slowed the blades and smoothed the towers to prevent roosting.

Wind can fill this niche to some extent.

The biggest problem with peak loading however is summertime air conditioning. One might argue - and have a point - that people need to use less air conditioning when a breeze is blowing. This is one area where - for those who can afford it - solar energy fits very well. Solar's peak production coincides exactly when the highest probability exists for an air conditioning load. Of course in some places there are indeed frequently hot winds, so wind can address some of the air conditioning requirements in these areas.

However there are other circumstances under which wind can be well suited for peak loads. Heating demand is highest when cold winds blow. It is relatively easy to replace all of the oil and natural gas used for home heating with electricity. In this case wind can be appropriately timed.

The biggest drawback to wind is however that it's availability is not timed beyond what can garner from the weather forecast. However when the wind is blowing one can shut off natural gas plants now used for peak - and some - base loading. Whenever the wind is blowing this offers an alternative to ameliorating global climate change by shifting loads away from burning natural gas - a dangerous and dirty fuel.

For the long run, nuclear power can be fitted to address peak loading via the use of high temperature reactors designed to produce hydrogen via thermochemically driven scission of water. This hydrogen can either be stored in short term tanks as hydrogen or, if long term stocks are desired, be used to hydrogenate carbon dioxide to make DME, or even propane or methane. However any such technology is still unproved in the sense that no current industrial plants operate. My own criteria for the current state of affairs is that we should rely on those technologies that we have demonstrated and that we know will work. Several hydrogen producing nuclear reactors are on the drawing boards, and a pilot sized plant is already under construction in China. South Africa has made a huge commitment to using hydrogen in this way because of its reliance on the modular pebble bed reactor: 24 such reactors are planned. (This is a type of reactor I don't like.) Nevertheless, for the immediate moment - and we are in an immediate crisis - nuclear capacity is only known to operate with high proved success as a base load source of electricity only. The only option for using base load capacity for peak use is to engage in peak leveling - shifting certain operations like water pumping and aluminum manufacture to off peak hours, but this is only possible to a limited extent and definitely has economic implications.

All of the above suggests that wind power capacity should be built as quickly as is possible wherever it is suitable. It definitely is now a successful easily scalable technology. It is immediately available. We need this capacity.

it really bothers me,
that wind advocates always expect someone else
to be the reserve

I'm tired of
..................
I get to cherry pick the customers,
if I can't temporarily meet their needs,
somebody MUST help them, when I choose,
at NO cost to me
.................
as a political demand

...that storage operations and producers would do just fine as separate operations. Eventually the grid will probably resemble the commodities market. Of course the enabler needed is cost-efficient storage -- right now nothing is beating pumped hydro for overall life-cycle cost, and the disadvantages of that of course are similar to hydroelectric in environmental impact. That needs to change.

Use surplus energy to manufacture whatever alternatives to fossil gasoline/diesel/kerosene we end up using. In a scenario with lots of nuclear power, that would probably be most efficient if the reactor heat were applied directly to the chemical processes generating the fuel. Since nuclear reactors like to run at full capacity all the time, that would be a good solution for that problem. Run them all the time, but on off-peak hours, just use that energy for creating motor fuel instead of electricity for the grid.

...but for those sources where the takeoff is in electricity, it'll probably be more economical as technology progresses to use an efficient electrical storage system. Kinda a shame just to convert it to heat.

Those salt-solution fuel cells seem like a viable candidate. Per terawatt-hour stored, they appeared to be much cheaper than any other options I'm aware of. Storing terawatt-hours of electricity affordably and with minimized environmental impact doesn't seem to be a well-solved problem. Compressing air into tanks seems feasible, but I don't know how to estimate how many such tanks would be needed, and of what size.

I bet he won't be since he doesn't have a home overlooking that ridgeline.